Posted on 11/29/2008 9:29:52 PM PST by neverdem
But you know something, Dave? You are an exception to the rule. Look around and really read into the posts of many of your fellow FReepers. You will discover that many of these FReepers do not share your ideals of economic freedom and limited government when pressed about it. Look how under-utilized the RLC (Republican Liberty Caucus) portion of this site is. And look at how many you'll find here that will defend Pat Buchanan's nonsensical editorials or that think Mike Huckabee's policies should be the direction we take. None of it being calls for limited government.
NeverDem - you SOOOOO right. I also just left a Thanksgiving dinner I’d just as soon forget.
Here I was talking with all middle class business and technical types. What were they mad about? What was most important to them on that holiday?
That the greedy auto execs had taken private corp aircraft to the Washington DC hearings. “They just don’t get it”....they all said. “They need to feel the pain others are feeling”....how thoughtless”...and on it went. I asked, Was the proposed bailout a smart idea, would it work? - they had no idea.
All they knew was Bush had gotten us into a hell of a mess and Obama had his work cut out for him. They all agreed the stimulus needed to be BIG (VERY BIG).
One guest actually thought Obama was pretty conservative and might be as conservative as Bush. Later during desert this same fellow remarked that he thought smoking should be outlawed in every city in America, ‘cause he thought it would save on health care.
I left the dinner feeling well fed, but discouraged.
IMHO, no alternative but the flat tax....combined with enough deregulation to shut down the K St lobbyists for a generation....at that point you’ll see America ignite like wildfire....
But that happens only when We the People decide to make it happen.
I think most of the thinking people among us feel well Fed. We should be feeling well Treasuried and well taxed, as well. Yes, it is discouraging!
Your fellow diners, do you suppose any of them will be feeling well fared in the not-so distant future?
Thanks for the information. That was interesting. I take it you’re in the farming business?
I just used 10/100 for illustration purposes, though. I’m aware that 10 acres isn’t really viable....though my grandparents did eke a living from a “farm” in Oklahoma that was less than that in the 30’s through the 70’s. I think their biggest crop was stray dogs, but they somehow made a living off a few dozen chickens, a couple of milk cows, a pig pen and, I believe, a small tract of potatos.
And one big colorful bird. A peacock I think it was. For some reason they always had a peacock around. It was one o those thing that didn’t seem strange at the time, but thinking back I’d sure like to know what the peacock was all about.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting data.
Hank
Just a thought: a lot of people around here keep peacocks on thier acerages because they keep the snake population way down.
First of all, I LOVE your tag line:
“Until the unborn are free, nobody is free...”
Never thought of it that way, but I will from now on. Thanks!
Secondly, as I was meandering across the fields with the dogs the other day, I was contemplating a run for local office in my Cow Town of 6,000 hearty souls.
I’m thinking my platform would be this:
I’m a Mom who has raised three kids on a budget, and more often than not on ONE income, meaning my HUSBAND worked and supported us while I raised the boys. I KNOW how to pinch pennies; I’m an expert at making ends meet.
I will work to continue to provide for you the following services paid for by YOUR TAX DOLLARS, in the most efficient manner possible. I will spend YOUR money on nothing else, but:
1. Firemen and Policemen
2. EMTs for emergencies
3. Trash pick-up in a timely and neat manner.
4. Filling in the potholes in the roads and making sure the roads are plowed in the winter.
5. Clean drinking water, whether you have City Water or a well/septic system.
6. An up-to-date, fully funded Library for your kids to use to expand their education. (Not EVERYTHING you learn is learned in school!)
7. School vouchers; you can send your kids to public OR private school. Your dollars, your choice for your family and your Property Taxes will NO longer be tied to schools, if you don’t currently have a child enrolled in school.
8. I will serve ONE term. And if you really, really like me, I’ll serve one more, but that’s IT! Term Limits are desperately needed from Dog Catcher on up to Congress.
And that’s about it...
Think I’d win? LOL! :)
You are correct when you say that there aren’t direct price controls on foods anymore, rather there are subsidies to producers. What you and Congress seem to miss is that by subsidizing the more inefficient producers, you not only make the industry overall less efficient (which can’t help but raise prices) but you also keep farmland *out* of the hands of the more efficient producers, which would increase yields and lower prices (ceterus peribus).
You are also forgetting tariffs and other import restrictions.
And some of the crops which are “overproduced,” like corn for example, wound up that way by mistake or for reasons having nothing to do with food. With corn, price supports in the form of tariffs on sugar lead to corn syrup being used as a substitute sweetener. To say nothing of the ethanol scam.
As for black people, I think the political and economic segregation of them will continue as long as the welfare state exists, which more or less creates a new generation of fatherless black Americans every ten years. This effect is seen anywhere the father has been replaced by welfare (food stamps, public housing, etc.), but it is especially pronounced in black communities for a variety of reasons and the disparity continues to grow. When you create an automatic underclass that is *not* taught to earn its way or that it even *can* earn its way, you create people who don’t see what the free market can do for them, feel society is against them, and that their only political allies can be those promising government intervention in the economy and in their lives to directly benefit them.
My answer, as always, has been to replace welfare with rigid child support laws, amply enforced. This will, for lack of a better term, reengineer society away from having frequent unprotected sex as the full cost of it (i.e. risk of impregnation) will fall on *both* sexes rather than just on women.
Most of the land that is “not in the hands of the most efficient producers” is the less productive land. Period, end of discussion. There isn’t much that that an efficient producer is going to do to make it produce more that the less efficient producer can’t or won’t do. The most efficient producers might have larger capacity equipment, that reduces planting/harvesting/fuel costs, but that won’t turn a 80BPA piece of corn ground into a 180BPA piece of corn ground. The best producing ground isn’t just a result of adding enough capital, technology and efficiency; it is often a convergence of weather, location, soil structure, etc. Having farmed in Nevada where we have very sterile soils in comparison to midwestern corn ground, I can speak with authority that you can’t “make” soil that will do what the best production ground can do naturally without going broke. The input costs to turn mediocre production ground into high-production ground will break you like a dry twig and are simply not sustainable. This was the case before fertilizer costs shot through the roof - today, fertilizer costs are such that if you don’t have some of the better ground around, you’re likely going to be slashing your input costs as you seek to transition away from high-input crops. Even with subsidies, many farmers cannot sustain the high input costs seen in the last year.
The most efficient producers are most often the ones with the best capital base, and they will pay a premium for the lands with the best yields, because they’ve figured out that the most production with the smallest land base is the best return on investment and the highest internal rate of return. The best producers rarely buy marginal lands; there’s no point in tying up capital on marginal lands if you have the money to pay up for the best production land possible. Take away the subsidies and the producers on marginal lands are left with the same input costs without the higher rewards of high-production ground and they go out of business first from the smallest margin or a negative return. The land most likely does not come back into production of the now-unsubsidized crop, especially once it has been out of production for even just a couple of years. It either goes into another crop, gets sold for development or is turned into pasture.
This is something else economists love to overlook - the costs for putting idle land back into production. They like to toss around figures in their stories and analysis as tho land is like a factory — sprinkle in a little cash, some labor and poof! Instant production. Oh, and the other assumption I see all the time is that land is fungible. Yet more evidence that they’re without a clue as to how the real world works.
The most infuriating thing about the farm subsidies programs is that there is too much emphasis by Congress on the testimony and “analysis” of economists, most of whom wouldn’t know an ear of corn if you shoved two of them up their noses. Some of the pronouncements by economists about farming are so wildly wrong that it leaves farmers either in paroxysms of laughter, or spluttering with rage at the incoherent stupidity of these pronouncements of ‘fact.’ This has been ever such, ever since FDR’s economists thought it was a bright idea to send out roving bands of thugs, er, New Deal Bureaucrats, to shoot cattle/sheep/swine and throw them into a ditch to reduce over-supply and raise prices in 1934/1935.
HFCS: The big market for field corn in the US is as animal feed. As long as beef/pork/chicken remain profitable enterprises, there’s going to be big corn production. HFCS isn’t kept viable by sugar tariffs or created as a market because of sugar tariffs - it was started by the low cost of the input product and it is kept viable by the fact that it is cheaper than other sugars any way you cut it. Even if you wiped the sugar tariffs off the map, you can still crank out HFCS at cheaper prices because corn is so cheap. The only way to make HFCS go away is to raise the price of corn. The sugar tariff/quota isn’t in place to protect HFCS production, it is in place to protect cane and beet sugar production.
The irony is that the tariffs/quotas haven’t done such a hot job at preserving those crops, because HFCS has pretty much gutted their markets internally. Unless you have fantastic cane yields, you can’t undercut HFCS product prices, and beet sugar ends up producing a product that costs twice what HFCS does even with good yields. In addition, HFCS production results in animal feed byproducts which a profitable product by itself - and this is key. You keep a component of the primary market while getting a byproduct - that makes corn a strong contender in the race to lower costs of production. Beet mash can be also be fed to cattle, but the beet crop itself is very expensive to plant and harvest - it just doesn’t pencil out easily any more because it is one of the more fertilizer-intense crops; it is certainly more fertilizer-intensive than corn.
Acres planted to beets in just the last year are down 15% - because of input costs making beet production non-economic on lower yield ground.
In addition, many beet processing plants have closed across the western US in the last 10 years because they just can’t compete in their end-product price vs. HFCS - and that’s with the sugar import quotas and price supports. When a local beet plant shuts down in a high-cost fuel environment, that sucks more profit out of the crop. Corn, unlike beets, has such a low cost of transport that it isn’t funny. Corn has the advantage that it flows through augers and drop-bottom rail cars. Beets you have to put into a dump truck with a loader. The ability to auger corn helps automate the whole transportation process for corn and further lowers corn’s costs to make HFCS over beet or cane production.
Enough about beets. Let’s turn to cane.
One of the two cane sugar producers in Hawaii (Gay & Robertson) is leaving the business after 119 years, even with the import tariffs/quotas, because the high price of fertilizer and fuel makes it impossible to compete with HFCS and get an economic return. G&R is getting out of the cane sugar business (on about 35,000 acres of land) to produce (drum roll please) cane-based ethanol, which offers a better economic return due to high fuel prices on the islands.
Why all these structural changes? Because Congress has made corn cheap by creating a subsidy program that creates huge surpluses of corn. Fantastically cheap. Again, if corn had only kept up with the CPI since August 1973, corn would be over $14/bu today. Instead, it is only about $4/bu, and before the commodity run-up starting in 2005, it was in the $2+/bu range. That’s fantastically cheap relative to other products and inflation - and made that way by keeping more corn producers in business. HFCS and ethanol are by-products of how cheap corn is - the only point at which these became big priorities for the corn producers is when corn prices became so low that they had to find other uses for the crop. So the producers got to work and created industries that could assume a cheap input going forward for quite some time to come.
Any way you cut it, without the subsidy programs, prices of the “big six” would go UP, not down. The input costs won’t change with the removal of the subsidy programs, so there’s no way that corn input costs are going down. The only people who believe that prices will go down are the same types of economists that have brought us the disaster on Wall Street, the same manner of mental masturbation that thinks that allowing banks to become nation-wrecking “too big to fail” financial institutions to “reduce costs and increase efficiencies” was a suave idea.
I’d like to see subsidies go away, but I know what I’m advocating — people WILL pay more for their food. I can show the linkage directly on the ground, and from the ground up through the farmer’s balance sheet, into the co-ops, into the grain elevators and into food processors. It doesn’t take a PhD in economics to project this - only a good background in actually running a business.
Wow, not sure what to say, except that you’re making a lot of straw man arguments.
First off, you selectively pick those subsidies which increase production to lower prices while ignoring those other subsidies (and various interventions) which *raise* prices. You pretty much shrugged off what I had to say about sugar, but not before misconstruing my point (I never said the tariffs/import restrictions were designed to help corn growers, it was an ill-advised attempt at helping cane sugar farmers). Sugar *is* the preferable sweetener. Go to the Mexican section of your grocery store. Pick up a bottle of Mexican-bottled Coca Cola. Look at the ingredients. No corn syrup. Sugar. Same in Europe. Americans are denied the cheap cane sugar from foreign markets because of import restrictions. This has had a role (its size is debatable) in our obesity epidemic.
Thanks to subsidies on American producers, developing countries often have no economic reason to make full use of their land, further crimping supply.
Fifty three percent of American voters know nothing about economics. They follow the guidance of the MSM. They want to do the “in” thing.
I thought the faltering farm economy was due to Carter’s 21 percent interest rates.
From what I can see Republican and conservative fortunes are linked to prosperity, economic security, and the promotion of stable families. Sadly, many Republican policies have undermined these.
Immigration, Legal and Illegal
Free Trade
Housing as a Social program.
Complaining about Political Correctness, but sill allowing Social Marxists to control education.
Sadly, many RINO policies have undermined these.
Butz slashed regulations and trade barriers while increasing subsidies. The result: Family farms closed down, huge agribusiness concerns expanded mightily, production soared, and domestic food prices fell dramatically. For Pollan, Butz's machinations lie behind the current obesity epidemic and a broader coarsening of American life. But there is a very real sense in which Butz ended the specter of hunger in the United States. Apart from the subsidies, there is much to admire in his approach: His package of reforms delivered a better quality of life to millions of Americans.No problem -- Obama will lead the fight to close down the remaining agriculture and animal husbandry in the US, in order to increase our dependence on foreign food sources, oops, I mean, because he's tryin' to fight greenhouse gas emissions from cattle asses. And, y'know, because he's secretly against illegal immigration.
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